When He Was Wicked (Bridgertons #6)(91)

Her lower lip caught between her teeth. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “Don’t make me figure it out.”

He lifted one sardonic brow.

“Not yet, at least,” she finished.

Words, he thought, almost dispassionately. He’d had his words, and now these were hers.

“You can’t take it back,” he said in a low voice.

She shook her head.

He rose slowly to his feet. “There will be no backing out. No cold feet. No changed minds.”

“No,” she said. “I promise.”

And that was when he finally let himself believe her. Francesca did not give promises lightly. And she never broke her vows.

He was across the room in an instant, his hands at her back, his arms around her, his mouth raining desperate kisses on her face. “You will be mine,” he said. “This is it. Do you understand?”

She nodded, arching her neck as his lips slid down the long column to her shoulder.

“If I want to tie you to the bed, and keep you there until you’re heavy with child, I’ll do it,” he vowed.

“Yes,” she gasped.

“And you won’t complain.”

She shook her head.



His fingers tugged at her gown. It fell to the floor with stunning speed. “And you’ll like it,” he growled.

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

He moved her to the bed. He wasn’t gentle or smooth, but she didn’t seem to want that, and he fell upon her like a starving man. “You will be mine,” he said again, grasping her bottom and pulling her toward him. “Mine.”

And she was. For that night, at least, she was.





Chapter 22




…I am sure you have everything well in hand. You always do.

—from the dowager Viscountess Bridgerton to her daughter, the Countess of Kilmartin, immediately upon the receipt of Francesca’s missive The hardest part about planning a wedding with Michael, Francesca soon realized, was figuring out how to tell people.

As difficult as it had been for her to accept the idea, she couldn’t imagine how everyone else might take it. Good God, what would Janet say? She’d been remarkably supportive of Francesca’s decision to remarry, but surely she hadn’t considered Michael as a candidate.

And yet even as Francesca sat at her desk, her pen hovering over paper for hours on end, trying to find the right words, something inside of her knew that she was doing the right thing.

She still wasn’t sure why she’d decided to marry him. And she wasn’t sure how she ought to feel about his stunning revelation of love, but somehow she knew she wished to be his wife.

That didn’t, however, make it any easier to figure out how to tell everyone else about it.

Francesca was sitting in her study, penning letters to her family—or rather, crumpling the paper of her latest misfire and tossing it on the floor—when Michael entered with the post.

“This arrived from your mother,” he said, handing her an elegantly appointed cream-colored envelope.

Francesca slid her letter opener under the flap and removed the missive, which was, she noted with surprise, a full four pages long. “Good heavens,” she murmured. Her mother generally managed to say what she needed to say with one sheet of paper, two at the most.

“Is anything amiss?” Michael asked, perching himself on the edge of her desk.

“No, no,” Francesca said distractedly. “I just…Good heavens!”

He twisted and stretched a bit, trying to get a look at the words. “What is it?”

Francesca just waved a shushing hand in his direction.

“Frannie?”

She flipped to the next page. “Good heavens!”

“Give me that,” he said, reaching for the paper.

She turned quickly to the side, refusing to relinquish it. “Oh, my God,” she breathed.

“Francesca Stirling, if you don’t—”

“Colin and Penelope got married.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “We already knew—”

“No, I mean they moved up the wedding date by…well, goodness, it must have been by over a month, I would think.”

Michael just shrugged. “Good for them.”



Francesca looked up at him with annoyed eyes. “Someone might have told me.”

“I imagine there wasn’t time.”

“But that,” she said with great irritation, “is not the worst of it.”

“I can’t imagine—”

“Eloise is getting married as well.”

“Eloise?” Michael asked with some surprise. “Was she even being courted by anyone?”

“No,” Francesca said, quickly flipping to the third sheet of her mother’s letter. “It’s someone she’s never met.”

“Well, I imagine she’s met him now,” Michael said in a dry voice.

“I can’t believe no one told me.”

“You have been in Scotland.”

“Still,” she said grumpily.

Michael just chuckled at her annoyance, drat the man.

“It’s as if I don’t exist,” she said, irritated enough to shoot him her most ferocious glare.